How Shakespeare's masterly use of suspense can still shock

More than four centuries after he wrote his goriest tragedy, it still makes people faint - further proof that anything modern dramatists can do, Shakespeare almost always did first, and better.

A decade or so ago a new generation of young playwrights, led by Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, caused a stir with so-called in-your-face theatre.

Almost every new play you went to see, especially at the Royal Court, included a graphic bout of eye-gouging, anal rape or cannibalism.

Although I remember many people walking out of such shows in disgust, I can't remember many fainting. The secret of Shakespeare's success is that he understood that it is suspense that makes matters really unbearable.

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The most shocking scene in Titus Andronicus is when the suffering old warrior has his hand chopped off before our very eyes. It is shocking because we have to wait for several minutes, listening to endless puns on the word hand, before the cruellest cut falls.

As Oscar Wilde once said: "The suspense is terrible - I hope it lasts." In Macbeth, too, the massacre of Macduff's family is especially nerve-shredding because Shakespeare gives the audience a chance to get to know the victims and realise what will happen to them, long before the killers arrive.

One dramatist has improved on Shakespeare - if that is the mot juste. The blinding of Gloucester in King Lear is bad enough ("out, vile jelly") but, in Edward Bond's adaptation of the play, he invented a revoltingly ingenious eyeball-removing machine.

The St John Ambulance Service was on permanent standby when the play was staged at the Barbican Pit theatre, and up to half a dozen fainting victims were taken out of each performance on stretchers. Film may offer realistic special effects, but the theatre, with necessarily cruder techniques, can still create a visceral effect. There is something about the horrors happening to flesh-and-blood actors that makes theatrical violence particularly effective.

Director Lucy Bailey judges the shock-horror to cruel perfection in Titus Andronicus at the Globe.

Film director Bryan Forbes was less successful with his notorious production of Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980.

When Peter O'Toole took to the stage after killing Banquo, drenched in stage blood, the audience laughed with incredulous delight.

It was one of the most famous flops in theatrical history. It requires real art to make people faint with shock.